


Hush

by Lia (Liafic)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-17
Updated: 2014-11-17
Packaged: 2018-02-25 17:32:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2630297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liafic/pseuds/Lia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Our people are divided this way: those who remember and those who do not—and me in the middle, hovering on the edge of remembrance like a flower about to bloom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hush

### P A R T   O N E

I remember something—a bright image like sunlight on snow. My clumsy child hands were surrounded by flowers and buried in the damp earth, and my knees were pale and dirty under the hem of my dress. The cloth was a strange colour, not the faded grey of fur but pale blue like the sky before sunrise. 

My father tells me this is just a dream, and perhaps he is right. The rest of my mind is filled with misty wilderness, a reassuring pattern of forests and cliffs. At night, my eyelids are etched with the blind imprint of light bursting out across the sky. 

I think I saw my mother. Her hair was dark and wispy, her smile the brightest white. Her laughter cut through the summer air like the cry of a bird. 

• 

The wind scatters the smoke over our cooking fires. One of the older boys killed a deer this morning, and a coppery trail of blood streaks its way across my cheek as I push my hair away from my face. My hands are stained with it where they lie buried behind the ribs of the animal, the place where its heart used to beat. 

It is becoming harder to hunt in this area, and sometimes we see lights on the ocean at night, out past the white faces of the cliffs. This is the way it always happens, and I will wake up with fear hovering in my throat until we are clear of the danger. We will pack up our camp before the first rains of spring, before we can be discovered. 

The elders say the others are not human. The children whisper stories around the campfire of creatures cloaked in the same terrible light we see over the ocean and in the sky at night. They hunt us as though we are animals, and they will kill us if they find us. We move through the woods like ghosts. 

My father once told me there was a time when things were different. He means the time before my mother died, before the others began to hunt us. Some nights I find him by the fire, his shoulders shaking in silence. It must be more difficult for those who remember the time before. Our people are divided this way: those who remember and those who do not—and me in the middle, hovering on the edge of remembrance like a flower about to bloom. 

My breath mists before me in the air, the taste of rust flooding my mouth. The eyes of the deer have frozen open in the cold. I stand abruptly and leave the others to finish skinning the animal, and no one says anything. They have been avoiding me more and more ever since last summer, and I do not blame them. 

Who could forgive a murderer? 

• 

His hair is orange like firelight, and this is the first thing I notice about him when the men drag him into the camp. It is early morning, and I watch from the opening of my tent, the damp air freezing in the fur of my blankets around me. His clothing is a strange black, and one of the men has wrestled a thin wooden stick from his grip and snaps it in a shower of sparks. 

He thrashes like a cornered animal, and they kick him to the ground. At the impact, his leg cracks sharply. “Wait!” he yells. “Please, just—” 

One of the men strikes him across the temple, and he slumps forward with a strange keening sound. My father emerges from his tent holding a wooden club, wearing a stony expression that slips between fear and sadness. Is this one of the others, those who hunt us—just a young man? 

I am moving across the clearing, and the cold air burns in my throat. The men step away from my path, but the prisoner is unconscious and unmoving now. When I fall to my knees between him and my father, the rough frozen earth cuts into my skin. 

“What are you doing?” my father says. 

“Father, please—” 

“It will be painless and quick,” he says. “Move now, before he wakes up.” 

“No, this is wrong!” 

The prisoner groans from behind me, and I fling my arm around his shoulders and shield him the way a mother shields a child. Something like the sound of thunder rumbles through my ears. He smells like sunshine. 

“Move!” my father roars. 

I close my eyes, and the shallow breathing of the prisoner brushes against my neck. How can this creature not be human? His cold fingers grasp my elbow— 

There is a dull thud as the wooden club falls to the ground. When I blink against the white expanse of the sky, my father is watching me with a thousand blades in his eyes, clenching his empty fist. We both know what I have done, but the others wait for my father to explain his sudden decision. 

How could he explain something neither of us understands? 

He turns away from me, and the strands of grey in his hair are stark in the morning light. “Tie him well,” he finally says. “The prisoner will remain under guard. He may have information we can use.” 

He reaches to retrieve the club but straightens immediately, leaving it in the spot where I made it fall. He is afraid of me the way all the others are afraid of me—afraid of the inexplicable things that happen around me. He protects my secret now the same way he has protected it since last summer. 

In the silence, the prisoner collapses into my arms. 

• 

Time passes slowly. I watch the men take turns filing in and out of the tent where the prisoner is kept. When the last snowfall comes on a morning that streaks across the sky like fire, I move to the back of the tent and pull out one of the sharpened posts that anchor the hide to the earth, slipping into a close darkness that smells of blood and sweat. 

“Who’s there?” the prisoner says, his voice a harsh croak in the silence. 

“Be quiet,” I tell him, and I press a hand against his mouth. 

He does not move. I eventually let my hand fall, and he remains tense and still even when I pull a small knife from inside my furs and begin to cut away at the knots that bind him to the center post. Through the smoke hole above us, the snow melts and drips across his forehead, plastering his hair to his face. 

“When we move camp, they will kill you,” I tell him. 

“I won’t make it until then,” he says. “They’ve been starving me . . . and torturing—” 

“Be quiet,” I tell him again, and I press my water skin to his mouth. 

He closes his eyes and drinks until he coughs, the water sputtering up and leaving pale streaks over his skin through the dirt and blood. 

“Who are you people?” he whispers. I ignore him and pull at the cords until they are loose, and he moves his arms slowly, joints stiff and creaking. “Do the others here not know what you are? You used magic that day.” 

I strike him with the flat of the knife, and his head snaps back against the post. When I rise above him, he looks up at me with eyes the colour of the sea. 

“I will take you from our camp, and you can run from there,” I tell him. 

“No,” he says. “My leg . . . I would need a wand to Apparate back to London.” 

“What is Apparate?” I say, the word alien on my tongue. “What is London?” 

He slumps back against the post. “Do you know where we are?” 

“You have to promise not to lead the hunters back to us. You have to promise—” 

I whirl at the sound of rustling behind me. Cold air bursts into the tent, and my father is there at the entrance. 

“No—” the prisoner says, and when he tries to stand, his broken leg buckles under him, and his eyelids flutter closed. He falls back to the dirt in a heap. 

“Bind him again,” my father hisses. “Do it now, before anyone can see what you’ve done.” 

“Father, please . . . we can set him loose and that can be the end of this.” 

“Hermione!” he says. His grip is firm around my wrist. “Do as I say, for once in your life!” 

“My mother wouldn’t have wanted this—” 

He curses and pushes me aside, kneeling to bind the prisoner again. The camp is still silent around us, and I know they will not wake for hours, huddling in their furs until the day is warmer. Above us, light darts across the sky—the same crackling sort of light that sparked from the wooden stick the prisoner held when we first captured him. 

My father sits back on his heels in the dirt, and the prisoner breathes steadily in the silence. I can see it more clearly now through the torn cloth of his trousers, how the broken bone juts sharply under his skin. He will not survive until spring. 

Beyond the mouth of the tent, the forest is grey with morning and the smell of wet thawing things. 

• 

I visit him each day in the hidden hours before sunlight burns away the last icy tendrils of night. Infection burns through his blood, and his face grows pale and his forehead feverish. Sometimes his hands twitch and he speaks in a language I cannot understand—the strange language of the others. 

There is an ocean beyond the cliffs, and I am the only one who thinks to swim there. There is a strange compulsion that comes over the rest of them when they wade beyond a certain point, where the air crackles with a strange smell like that of struck flint in the moment before a flame sparks to life. Even I cannot swim much farther past that point, which the children call the edge of the world. 

I wonder what lies beyond—what the others do not want us to reach. 

My hair is drying in wild saltwater curls when I slip into the tent on our last morning. Tomorrow we will pack up our camp, and the elders will take the prisoner beyond the edge of the forest and slit his throat. Perhaps it will be a mercy if the infection does not take him first. 

I bring him dried meat and willow bark tea, and I tilt the rough wood cup to his mouth and watch as the pain slowly fades from his eyes. 

“Are we by the sea?” he says. His lips are parched and cracking. He is delirious. 

“Yes,” I tell him. “Just over the cliffs, beyond the trees.” 

“I can smell . . . the saltwater and—” 

“Shh, quiet now,” I tell him, and I brush his hair back from his forehead. 

“I can see sunlight on the waves,” he whispers. “Can you take me there—there beyond the wards?” 

I move closer so he can rest against my shoulder. The stale smell of sweat clings to the back of my throat, a cloying thing. He is shivering, and I pull my fur around us both. “Do you mean the edge of the world?” 

“Yes,” he says. His lips twitch upward in a weak smile. “I wanted to see beyond that, beyond all of this.” 

“Shh, it’s all right.” 

“My name is Ron,” he says. “I wanted you to know before I die—you beautiful creature . . .” 

The first real light of day spills into the tent through the smoke hole above us, and my throat and eyes burn with it. 

There is a secret I have been keeping, the secret of last summer: a cold still body on the ground—no wounds, dead eyes, and a light like the light that crackles across the edge of the world. I have hidden it from my people for so long, this unnaturalness that separates me from them and puts fear in the eyes of the father who loves me. 

The prisoner will die here, but perhaps the others can help him in ways my people cannot. 

I understand now. 

“Take my hand,” I tell him. “Can you see your London? Tell me, please—Ron.” 

“Your name,” he says. His fingers are burning hot around mine. “Can you tell me your name?” 

“My name . . .” My father always told me our names have power, and this is something I cannot share with one who has hunted us, not this—not the beautiful name my mother gave me. “My name is Rebecca,” I tell him, from the bible stories my father told me: the girl who journeyed far from her homeland. The lie slips off my tongue like snow melting off bare branches. 

“Rebecca . . .” 

“London,” I say. “Tell me about London, quickly.” 

“The towers . . .” he says. His voice drops and wavers, and his grip on my hand loosens. “The buildings are tall and dark, and the river is muddy. The sky burns with magic—” 

There is a commotion outside, and I hear my father shouting. They have found my empty tent. 

Thunder roars through my veins, and the air sparks around us. I memorise the smell of campfires and pine, the dark shapes of trees against the sky overhead. Will this be the last time I see my home in the wilderness—the last time I can be Hermione? In the cold light of morning, the mouth of the tent flutters open, and my father is running toward me, running . . . 

We flicker into nothingness like moths embracing a flame. 

### P A R T   T W O

My body clatters against smooth stone, my fingers still intertwined with his. 

There is a deep whirring sound behind everything, like the buzz of thousands of insects, and then blackness slips over my eyes. A cloth is forced into my mouth so I cannot bite. I am suffocating, and strong hands grip my shoulders and hold me in place as I lash out. The air smells like rain and bitter smoke. It all happens so quickly. 

“Rebecca!” I can hear Ron shouting. “Rebecca—” 

There is a sharp cracking sound, the thud of a body against stone. A strange whining cuts through the air around me, and it is only when someone cuffs me against the side of my head that the sound stops and I realise it was my own scream, feral and wild. 

“Look at her—a Muggle?” someone says. “Quickly, kill her and be done with it.” 

At the sensation of a cord being pulled around my wrists, I scream again. These are the others, and they will kill me the way they killed my mother. Where is Ron? The thunder . . . no, no—there is light and heat beyond the darkness covering my face, and I am thrown aside onto the hard ground once more. The air around me is thin and hot. 

I taste blood in my mouth, the skin on my knees burning where I have skidded across the ground. When the cloth is torn from my eyes, I see the destruction I have wrought. Ron is nowhere, and the stone earth around me is pitted and blackened by flame. Black stars swim at the edge of my vision. I feel so strange, as though something inside me is about to be torn apart— 

The trees in this place are straight and tall, barer and darker than any trees I have ever seen. 

Someone is holding me in place, tying my hands behind my back. Everything blurs, and my last clear image is the fleeting reflection of light against hair as pale blond as the sun. 

• 

Pain lances behind my eyes when I wake. The world is white—everything white. Mottled sunlight spills over me, and my fists clench around a strange bare fur. I blink through a thin sheen of tears against the brightness. 

“Try not to move.” The voice is cold and male, the words more a command than anything else. 

“Where am I?” I ask. When a tall figure moves across the light, I close my eyes again. 

“You are under my protection,” he continues. “Do you recall anything about your abductors?” 

The darkness swirls behind my eyelids. I do not understand him. “My abductors . . .” 

“The savages,” he says. “You were captured and held by Muggles, were you not?” 

My skin no longer smells like saltwater. In a forest somewhere far away, is my father searching for me? Perhaps winter has passed and I have slept through the year. “Please let me go,” I say. 

“Good God, how long have you been living out there with them?” 

“You don’t understand—” 

He says something else, and warmth washes over me. Sleep pulls from somewhere behind my spine, and the rest of his words whirl into nothingness. From somewhere far away, I can hear waves crashing against the white faces of cliffs. 

• 

I wander through this strange home like a lost bird. I cannot understand how to leave. It is night, and my bare feet fall on glassy stone beneath me. The whole place is tall and straight, all hard edges. I cannot hear the howl of the wind through bare branches, only a deep silence underlain with the same droning hum. My furs are gone, and I am wearing a loose white cloth that drapes to my ankles. 

Firelight flickers from the distance ahead. I want to go there, but I feel weak and cold. When I sink to the ground under the weight of my exhaustion, the slapping impact of my body against the stone rings through the silence. 

I hear the echo of footsteps, and strong hands pull me up. 

“Come now,” he says. He smells like wood smoke and something else, like winter. “Come back to bed.” 

“No—no, please.” 

“All right,” he says. “Lean against me, then. Slowly.” 

I stagger against him toward the brightness of the fire, and he sets me down on a soft platform covered in red hide. The warmth flickers over my face, and he drapes a blanket over my shoulders. 

“You must be starved,” he says. 

Am I? I feel nothing but the strange suffocating sensation I have felt ever since I arrived here. The tips of my fingers are numb, as though I am unable to draw enough breath to keep myself alive. There is a chiming sound, and he is speaking to someone softly. 

There are strange things in this room, little coloured boxes that line the walls—thousands of them. 

“Do you like to read, then?” he says, and he pulls one of the boxes from the shelf and holds it toward me. It opens in a flutter in his hands, covered in little black marks. I do not move to touch it, and eventually he withdraws it and tucks it back into the wall. “No, of course not. I apologise.” 

There is a knocking sound, and a strange small person brings in a tray and sets it down on a low block of wood by the fire before disappearing again. 

“Here,” the man says, handing me a small cup filled with fragrant cloudy tea. “You take sugar as well, I assume?” 

I stare at him across the distance between us. His eyes are grey like the sky before a storm, and his features are pointed and strong. He is beautiful the same way a wild bird is beautiful—distant and unreadable. He holds a small bowl toward me filled with white powder that looks like the salt we gather from the base of the cliffs during spring, and I flinch away from him. 

“All right,” he says. “It’s all right. Do you understand me?” 

I nod, and he steps back and turns away from me to face the fire. He is a tall dark silhouette, his clothing strange and cut straight around his frame. 

“Do you remember a time before you were taken by the savages?” 

“I am one of them—a savage,” I say. The word burns on my tongue. 

“That isn’t possible,” he replies. “When did you discover your magic?” 

“My magic? I killed a man last summer . . . by accident.” 

He gives a low laugh. “I killed many men last summer, and many since then,” he replies. It is not meant to be a threat. “My name is Draco Malfoy,” he says. 

“I am Rebecca,” I reply—and I suppose, for now, it has to be true. 

• 

The months pass slowly. I am a prisoner in this house, and I miss running through the forest and feeling the salty spray of the ocean against my skin. From the windows in my bedroom, I can see people walking by in the streets below—mothers with their children, men with strange dark robes. Sometimes I think about Ron and wonder whether he survived, and often I think about my people. I miss the sound of children laughing around a campfire. 

Draco Malfoy teaches me many things, and I lose myself in the books that line his library. My head swirls with new words and new ideas, thousands of stories beyond the ones my father could tell me. At night, the sky still crackles with magic, the magic of the wards that encircle the nation and protect us from those who wait to invade from beyond the borders. 

Draco Malfoy tells me we are under the protection of the Dark Lord, who was anointed by God to rule over this nation like a father rules over his disobedient children. 

“Are the savage Muggles not also his subjects?” I ask him one day. I am curled up on the sofa in his study like a child, pausing as I read to him from one of the heaviest books. His work is very demanding, and he once told me these moments are the only times he has any peace. 

“The savages have no religion, no culture,” he says. “Rebecca, please—they are lower than animals.” 

“Then I am lower than an animal,” I tell him. 

“No,” he says. He leans forward and closes his eyes, pressing his fingers over the bridge of his nose. “You must stop questioning this, Rebecca. You don’t understand.” 

“Do you remember the time before?” I ask him. 

“Before what?” 

“Before you began to hunt us and drove us into the woods?” 

He stands so abruptly that his chair tumbles backward behind him. Colour burns high in his cheeks, and for a moment I wonder whether he is about to strike me. _I could kill him,_ I think, with absolutely certainty—I could do it if I had to. 

Silence reigns between us for a long moment before he leaves me there in that room, holding a book I do not care about and watching the fire burn lower and lower. 

• 

Fire arcs out across the sky, smoke billowing over the dark city skyline. At the force of the distant blast, the glass in my bedroom window shatters, and I clamber off the other side of the mattress and race down the hallway, ignoring the prick of glass shards biting into my feet. 

The door to the garden downstairs has been thrown open, and I run out onto the wet grass. I can hear a child shrieking from one of the neighbouring houses. In the sky, the wards blink out for a short precious moment—no droning hum, just scattered white stars overhead. 

By the time Draco Malfoy takes hold of my shoulder and pulls me into the doorway, the wards have flared back into existence. I try to shake him off and see what is happening, but his grip tightens. 

“Please, Rebecca!” He shoves me against the wall and slams the door behind us. Firelight flickers over his face through the window. “Our Lord has called an emergency council session. You must promise to remain here until the danger has passed.” 

“What was that—the wildfire?” 

“Rebels, monarchists,” he says. “Please, Rebecca . . . you must promise me.” 

“I promise, all right? I promise.” 

He has barely dressed, and he rolls down the sleeve of his shirt to cover a strange black scar that winds like a serpent up his arm. He has never told me where he goes every day. “I cannot protect you unless you stay here,” he tells me. 

Have I ever needed to be protected, or is this something he tells himself to justify keeping me here? He pushes my hair away from my face and presses his lips to my forehead: insistent and hurried. When he pulls away, there is something in the wilderness of his eyes that I do not want to understand. 

“I promise,” I tell him, and this time he believes me. 

• 

The sky is always grey in springtime. I can hear the rain on the cobblestones in the street outside, and sometimes I walk through the garden and let it fall over my skin as I move between the roses. Draco Malfoy says this is indecent, but he says it the same way he says most things around me now—with a slow smile curving the corner of his mouth. 

He wraps me in a thick cloak one morning when I come in from the chill. “Do you want to catch your death?” he says. 

“No, not even Death could catch me,” I tell him before wriggling from his grasp and stepping back out into the rain. 

“Rebecca . . .” 

“Well? Come and try it, then,” I shout, and I take off through the grass. 

He laughs—a strange surprised bark of a sound. I can hear the pounding of his footsteps behind me, and I duck through the trellis and run my fingers along the glistening leaves. We are still trapped inside the city, and the garden is small, but for a moment I imagine I can smell the pine trees of my youth. 

He catches me quickly enough, rounding the corner ahead of me with a triumphant “Aha!” When I turn to flee the other way, his hands fall onto my waist, swinging me back against him. 

“Am I Death, then, hmm?” he says, and laughter bursts from me helplessly. I can feel the heat of him through his clothes, through the thin wet fabric of my nightdress. His fingers are pressed over the bones of my hips, his lips against my ear. 

I fall silent altogether then, and his words are a sigh across my skin: “How could I love as wild a creature as you?” he says—as though I have the answers he has been seeking. 

When he kisses me, it tastes like the promise of summer. 

### P A R T   T H R E E

I once dreamed of a house with a flower garden, of a mother lost through time and memory. I have so many memories now, my life divided along an impassable line of before and after. This must be the way my father felt when everything changed. I think about him often, about how the grey must have wound its way through his braided hair by now. 

Do my people still scatter through the forests at each change of the seasons? 

• 

Our child runs between the branches, chasing unsuspecting birds. Winter has woven its slow way through the world, and the trees are bare. Against the grey of the city through the window below me, Thomas is a pale blur with dark curly hair like my own. He turns to wave up at me then, and I wave back—but he has already returned to his game. 

The cough comes upon me suddenly the way it always does, like a wave of grief that cannot be fought. I pull out my handkerchief and press it against my lips to muffle the sound. My chest is wracked with it, and my lips are hot and wet. The blood on the cloth is bright red against the white reflection of the overcast sky. 

At the sound of footsteps, I bury it in my sleeve. I can feel him come up behind me before his hand falls on my shoulder. 

“Beautiful, like his mother,” Draco says, looking down on our son. 

Time has not been easy on him, and his eyes are bruised with dark circles of exhaustion. His hair is getting too long, and he has begun tying it at the nape of his neck. Half the city has been obliterated by rebel attacks, and the carnage creeps closer and closer to us each day. I have resigned myself to the knowledge that there are things he will never tell me about this nation where we live. 

“You’ve been quiet lately,” he says. 

“Really?” I tilt my head to lean against his shoulder. He is as strong and solid as he has always been. “I suppose winter has crept into me early this year.” 

“Hmm,” he murmurs against the crown of my head. “Are you not happy any longer, Rebecca?” 

Below us, Thomas is collecting the last bright leaves of autumn in a bouquet. He has always been drawn to the garden to play, the way I once was. For a fleeting moment, half panic and half excitement, I imagine him running through the forest, quick and darting as a fawn. I imagine the joy that might fill his eyes if he could see the ocean, as wide and far as the edge of the universe. I close my eyes against the white glare of the sky. 

“My love,” I tell him, “I have never been happier.” 

• 

The ground shakes beneath my son as I pull the blanket up around his shoulders. Fires rage across the eastern part of the city, and Draco has been gone for two nights. The echo of a blast shatters the window in the foyer, and Thomas shrieks. 

“Mummy, no!” he cries, his tiny fingers grasping the hem of my dress. 

“Shh,” I tell him, stroking his hair quickly. “Mummy needs to make sure we’re safe, all right?” 

I press a kiss to his forehead and close the door to the study, where we have been curled up on the sofa waiting for the world to end. At the doorway, I pull my wand from my skirts and begin casting the spells Draco has taught me—the wards that will keep our family alive even if the city burns to rubble around us. 

Was this how my mother felt the day they attacked our home? 

People race by in the street outside. One of them drags the ragged stump of his leg behind him, held up on either side by injured friends. The smell of smoke brings on a coughing fit, and I struggle to say the words of the spell around the blood that chokes my throat. Someone is running toward me from the street, and blood sputters up over the front of my dress. Useless—useless! 

“Rebecca?” the man cries, and my wand clatters from my hand. 

There he is: His hair is the same firelight red, but he is darker and stronger now, and his arms bear me up before I can collapse, the same way I once held him against my chest in a forest clearing, my knees buried in the snow. 

“Are you injured?” Ron says. “Rebecca, please—” 

“No, no—Ron, you must help me!” 

“They’re after me,” he says, his voice low and fast. “We can run if you come with me now.” 

“What?” I say. “No, what do you mean?” 

“Rebecca, the Death Eaters are after all of us, all of the rebels—” 

“You did this?” 

“Please, we have to hurry—” 

“Ron, I have a family and—and a child!” 

He releases me and steps back suddenly. His eyes are the same sea blue I remember, but he is a man now—and the years lie between us like an impassable chasm. He retrieves my wand from the ground. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, all right.” 

“Ron, please!” 

“Step back,” he says, and he pushes me gently into the house and begins to cast the wards for me. They fall across the doorway, separating us in a curtain of pale blue like the lights I saw over the ocean so many years ago. He drops my wand on the doorstep and begins to turn away. “Keep safe,” he says. “Until we meet again.” 

“Ron!” I cry, and he stops in place. “I hope you find your ocean soon.” 

“Yes,” he replies, and he shoots me a fleeting smile, like the sun breaking through clouds. “We saw it together once, didn’t we?” 

Then he is gone into the winding streets, lost amid the smoke and the crowds. I retreat behind the door and close it with a soft click, and the wards drown out the sound until all I can hear is the racing beat of my heart. 

I know I will never see him again. 

• 

The fever comes in late winter, burning behind the cage of my ribs. I am listless in the white sheets of my bed, coughing and coughing until everything around me is stained with blood. Thomas is no longer allowed to see me, and I hear him crying for me at night. Draco speaks to him in a low, strained tone that hums through the echoing halls like a lullaby. 

This is tuberculosis, a disease these people have never heard of and for which they have no cure. My father used to treat it among our people, but the healers can do nothing for me here. The days pass in a blur of snow against the windows. 

Draco breaks slowly, falling apart one piece at a time. One morning I lie curled across his chest in the silence of our bedroom, and he strokes my hair back from my forehead. My whole body shivers against him. 

“The healers say Thomas will likely be spared,” he says. “He would have begun—to show signs of the illness by now, otherwise.” 

“And you, do you want to leave our child without a father?” 

He presses his lips to the back of my neck, just below my ear. “I will never leave your side,” he says. 

Delirium creeps up on me slowly these days. I often find myself in the forests of years past, staring up toward a blue sky through the silhouettes of leaves. Sometimes I imagine I am floating out beyond the edge of the world, and the sea buoys me up and cradles me the way a mother cradles a child. 

“Can you see it—the sunlight on the waves?” I ask him. 

“Shh,” he says over and over against my burning skin. 

“Can you take us to all the places beyond the wards, Draco?” 

“Just stories, my love,” he says. “Shh, quiet now.” 

“Will you take our son there, after I—can you see it, Draco? Can you promise me?” 

I feel him sob against my back, a horrible silent shudder. “Yes, I promise,” he says. “Shh, I love you, I love you . . .” 

I close my eyes and sink into the warmth of his body. The saltwater sunlight flickers across my face, and I smile. For a moment we are the only alive people in the world, drifting out to sea and over the edge of nothingness. 

• 

The roses bloom in the garden with the first rains of spring. Draco sleeps beside me in slow inhales and exhales of breath, and I pull back the sheets carefully so as not to wake him. My limbs are strong and steady as I walk silently through the halls, past the bedroom where my son lies sleeping. 

The air in the garden is cool and damp, the grass wet under my feet. I can no longer run as I once did, but I move through the trails between the flowers. Their petals are soft with the thrum of life under my fingers. I smile and close my eyes, letting the early morning sun warm my face. 

I once dreamed of a garden. 

When I glance up, he is there by the window, watching me the way he watched me that day with the firelight flickering over his face. His hair is paler now, and my limbs shake below me, but we are young and whole again in this moment. 

• 

The sky is blue above me, the grass wet under my body where I fall. I can smell flowers and earth and growing things—and there beyond the edge of the world, she calls my name with laughter that rings out like the cry of a bird.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Dramione Remix Round 5 based on the historical couple Pocahontas × John Rolfe.


End file.
